File-sharer will take RIAA case to Supreme Court

After losing three trials and one appeal, Jammie Thomas-Rasset still won't quit.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and her legal team are headed—they hope—for the Supreme Court.

Thomas-Rasset, a young Minnesota mom, was the first US file-sharer to take her RIAA-initiated lawsuit all the way to a trial and a verdict back in 2007. Five years, three trials, and one appeal later, she owes $222,000 to the recording industry for sharing songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network, but she doesn't plan to quit fighting.

I contacted Thomas-Rasset's lawyer, K.A.D. "Kiwi" Camara about today's appellate ruling restoring the judgment from Thomas-Rasset's first trial. Would Thomas-Rasset press on to the only legal avenue still open to her?

"Because even the reduced amount of damages that we won is punitive, the court of appeals erred by failing to apply the Supreme Court's punitive damages cases," he told me by e-mail. "We will seek certiorari from the Supreme Court to correct that error."

Thomas-Rasset will follow Joel Tenenbaum, the second US resident to take his file-sharing case that far. Tenenbaum—who reached the Supreme Court first because he had only one jury trial instead of three—tried to convince the justices that they should take his case to stop the music label plan to create, in his lawyer's words, "an urban legend so frightening to children using the Internet, and so frightening for parents and teachers of students using the Internet, that they will somehow reverse the tide of the digital future." The Supremes showed no interest, denying Tenenbaum's petition back in May.